We turned onto the county road in front of the house. Six minutes to the interstate.
“That makes sense,” I said. “But at least Holmes’s reasoning was sound, I mean, the investigative principle is true.”
“And which Holmes would you be referring to?” She was working on the Chinese food now, and her mouth was full. In lieu of chopsticks she was using a fork.
“You’re just prejudiced against him,” I said, “because you don’t like his author.”
“No, seriously, his entire approach to solving crimes is based on a logical fallacy.”
“A logical fallacy? Sherlock Holmes? I don’t buy it.”
She swallowed her food. “Doyle has Holmes say-I don’t know, I think it’s in The Hound of the Baskervilles or maybe The Sign of Fouranyway, he says: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ I’m not sure if that’s word-for-word, but you get it, right?”
“Sure, Spock even quoted it in the 2009 Star Trek movie.”
“Well, if he did, he was being illogical too.”
“Now you’re saying Spock was illogical.”
“Yeah.”
“Heresy.”
“Whatever.”
She took another bite.
I evaluated the investigative principle. “Tessa, I have to say, this time I think you’re wrong. That reasoning is perfectly logical.”
She polished off the rest of her food, set the plate aside. “Let’s say you’re trying to eliminate the impossible-how do you know you have?”
“Eliminated the impossible?”
“Yeah.”
I looked at her curiously, and she explained, “Just because something hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean it’s impossible. If you told Holmes that you could restart someone’s heart after she was dead
…” She held up her cell. “Or that he could use this thing to talk to anyone else in the world any time he wanted to, he would’ve said it was impossible.”
“It was. Then.”
She gave me a withering, annoyed look. “Obviously.”
“So what are you saying? That in theory it’s true, but in practice-”
“Yeah. Consider this: how could you ever be certain that you’ve eliminated all possibilities? That somehow you’ve considered every eventuality, every combination of the facts, that you’ve foreseen every unforeseeable contingency?”
“Well.” I was reluctant to admit it. “Unless you had infinite knowledge, you couldn’t.”
“Exactly, so that’s the thing: there’s no way to ever be certain you’ve eliminated the impossible. And absolute certainty that you’ve eliminated every possibility-”
“Is the prerequisite for applying Holmes’s axiom.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s illogical,” I said, anticipating her conclusion, “to base your investigative strategy on a methodology that cannot in essence be practiced in the real world.”
A pause. “That’s a good way to put it.”
So both Mr. Spock and Sherlock Holmes were wrong because they weren’t being logical enough.
I didn’t see that one coming.
For the rest of the drive to the Library of Congress while Tessa read and mumbled invectives about Holmes’s “specious deductive abilities,” I tried to consider the impossible possibilities related to this case.
What was I assuming to be impossible that might not be? How was that affecting my perspective? And where in this tangled mess of clues and killings was the dog failing to bark?
We arrived.
I dropped off Tessa at the library’s Independence Avenue entrance, waited until she was inside, and then parked in police headquarters’ underground garage, and, taking latex gloves and my computer bag with me, headed to the street to have a look at the car that the killers had left right under our noses.
Brad had hacked into the girl’s gmail account the day before he killed the Styles woman and the two police officers in Maryland last month.
And that was one of the reasons he’d proposed the plan for this week to Astrid.
Because of what he’d read in the young lady’s emails.
Tonight held so many possibilities, but to make them happen, he needed a little more information.
Hacking into secure sites was quickly becoming one of Brad’s favorite hobbies, so now he clicked to his computer’s Internet browser and surfed to the website of the Law Offices of Wilby, Chase amp; Lombrowski.
And he began his work.
82
11 hours left…
10:29 a.m.
A perimeter had been set up along the two adjacent streets. A swarm of curious onlookers stood just beyond the barricade while a bevy of bored-looking officers monitored them from this side of the line.
Lieutenant Doehring and Officer Tielman, the CSIU member I’d met Tuesday evening, were standing beside the Honda Accord in which the laptop had been found.
Doehring was filling out a stack of paperwork on a clipboard and Tielman was peering into the car’s open trunk, but his forensics kit was nowhere in sight. The Evidence Response Team must have already completed their work.
When Doehring saw me, he called, “How’s that arm?”
My eyes were on the crowd. “Hanging in there.”
“Ah. You should be a comedian.”
“Not according to my stepdaughter.” I gestured toward the roadblock at the end of the street and asked Doehring, “We’re taking video of that crowd, right?”
“Of course.”
“Let’s see if we can get any probables on body type and posture that might match Aria Petic or the unidentified man we captured on tape pushing the wheelchair into the Lincoln Towers.” As far as we knew, Aria Petic was a fictional name, but I could tell Doehring was tracking with me.
“Good call.”
“Also compare the facial characteristics of the people here with those of Richard Devin Basque.” I took a deep breath. “And Sevren Adkins. The Illusionist.”
He stared at me. “Richard Devin Basque and Sevren Adkins?”
“Yes. I think Basque might be in the city. I want to know if he’s in that crowd. Adkins is a long shot, but it’s something I need to check. I’ll fill you in later.” Then a thought. Why not. “And Dr. Renee Lebreau. You should be able to get her photo, height, and weight from Agent Kreger up in Michigan. Let’s see if she’s here.”
I saw him tap through his fingers, reviewing the five names. “I’ll be right back.” He pulled out his radio and stepped away.
I said to Tielman, “Tell me about the car.”
“Well, somebody gave a homeless guy a hundred dollars in quarters yesterday afternoon. He’s been feeding the meter every hour or so. Anderson saw him, figured he couldn’t possibly be the car’s owner. And, well, there you go.”
“Someone gave a homeless man a hundred dollars? What motivated him to keep feeding the-”
“The promise of more money, if he kept it going for twenty-four hours-and no, the homeless guy couldn’t give us a description of the man who gave him the money.”
Hmm.
“No one else besides Anderson noticed this?”
“Apparently not.”
I studied the vehicle. “Did your team find anything significant here?”
“Well, the luggage claim tag.”
“What?” Angela hadn’t mentioned that.
“Yeah. Cassidy found it. Farraday swept the car first, must have missed it. No prints on it, though. No DNA.”
Why would killers this careful leave a claim tag behind?
“What else?”
“We ran the plates, examined the carpeting for soil samples, no red flags; Cassidy checked the steering wheel, door handles, trunk for DNA and prints, but so far the only ones come from the owner’s family, two friends, and the guy who owned the car before they bought it last year.”